Junot Díaz seemed
poised to make an impression, his wiry frame hanging to the edge of his seat
due to a back ailment, with a mischievous gleam marking his eyes; he is the
very avatar of both coiled tension and quiet ease. The crowd in the audience is
both packed and eclectic; a personal delight is in seeing so many young writers
of colour whom Díaz has tirelessly championed. Adrian Harewood is the anchor
in the carousing range of issues that Díaz freely ranged to and fro across. The
casual eloquence, relentlessly peppered with obscenities, projected a trust: I
am not a brand, I am a person rooted in my experiences.

Alexander McCall
Smith, writing in his Introduction to an Everyman's Library collection of the
famed Indian novelist R.K. Narayan, wistfully recalls the extra year that
Narayan had to simply read when he failed his university entrance exam at his
first attempt: “To the modern mind, with our insistence on parcelling out of
time, a year of reading seems an almost unattainable luxury, redolent of the
simpler, less-hurried world which we have now lost.” Díaz affirms this luxury when
he half-jested that he fell into his métier simply out of an ardent desire “to be a
full-time reader.” In a later question from an audience member, a teacher, Díaz
confirmed the perception that he reads a book for every page he writes as no
mere exaggeration.

In this way, he
touches on the role of an artist, in a way that lightens the darkness surrounding
the insatiable curiosity of both practitioners and the reading public as to how
one actually writes. When he says that “books are more interesting than
writers,” even though the sparkling world of the famed The Paris Reviewinterviews refute that notion, we get a certain
sense of the yearning for permanence we all feel. This is the sense we get when
James Salter states, “I’m a frotteur,
someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them,
to wonder if that really is the best word possible.” But to get to this stage
requires work. And the best work, contrary to all the hype surrounding
open-office concepts, often occur when someone hunt their monsters in solitude.
Simply because this is hard work, and requires a wrestling with silences, it
isn’t glamorous or something that can be rushed. Díaz pointed out that nearly a
decade passed between the success of his debut collection Drownin 1997 and the runaway success of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—our generation’s Invisible Man—in 2008, there was just
the banal toil of a craftsman labouring over a keyboard, away from the
limelight with no surety of success. Years his accolades today can never
restore, however fulfilling its emolument. We catch a glimpse of his ferocious
work ethic, the bequest of most immigrant communities, as Díaz describes putting himself through college while working a
full-time job delivering pool tables.

He extends this
metaphor to the practice of living when he concludes, “family is incredibly
hard work.” When Harewood broaches the subject of abandonment of Díaz’s father,
who left behind his wife and five children, Díaz doesn’t mince the failure that
desertion is. In a later related discussion on masculinity and failure, Díaz
expands a lot on how patriarchy—like White Supremacy (his unadorned term for
racism)—is an immersive reality. There is a lot to admire in his desire to
explore the unexamined topics of intimacy and love, as his latest collection This Is How You Lose Her does, particularly
because it stems from an enforced childhood ethic of violence and sexual
conquest masquerading as masculinity. Yet the picture Díaz paints is not just
of a triumphant patriarchy but an enfeebled and enabled one, with women as co-conspirators,
where men (who were once boys) abscond, flail, and wither at alarming rates, especially
in poor communities where the preservation of dignity is overwhelmingly a matriarchal
realization and cultural inequality is just as corrosive as economic
disparities.

Perhaps this is
fodder for art (even if it beggars happiness in real life). As Díaz notes, “literature
does not thrive on happily adjusted people.” He likens his characters’ traits
as someone exercising the free right to vote, while he as the author just
arranges the vote rather than rig it. There is much more that Díaz expressed
regarding race and hegemony that is beyond the scope of this space to dissect.

The most indelible
impression, in my opinion, that Díaz made is in his insistence on the greatest
of all social liberties: dissent. He playfully chided the question posed by
Harewood on the criticism of Michael Eric Dyson on Cornel West’s scathing
pronouncement on Obama, by emphasizing that Obama can handle the battering,
occupying the peak position of privilege. He dismissed the idea that inner denouncement
lends fuel to the greater opponents who hate the President no-matter-what, that
it is more crucial to practice the art of criticism, even within our circles,
and let the intransigents rage. As Lars Vilks—in hiding from death threats by
Islamists—tells Cal Fussman in the current edition of Esquire: “The best thing for a work of art is argumentation.” Amen.

Have you ever gone to an event only to wonder why it isn’t
standing room only? As I arrived at the Education for the 21st
century event I was shocked at how small the crowd was; yes I realize there was
an important hockey game on, but I still wanted to yell from the roof top
“Ottawa, why aren’t you here?”

Even
though the venue was less than half full, everyone was engaged and interested
in the subject matter and before the event started the room was full of lively
discussions about education in anticipation of the speakers ahead. Given the level of excitement, I was shocked
when during the presentations it because clear that many in the audience were
unfamiliar with John Mighton’s JUMP Math program and the results it has
achieved for math education. I had just
assumed that everyone there would have been as excited as I was to hear him
speak, having read his book when it came out in 2007 after he was interviewed
on All in a Day. I knew of Joel Westheimer as the education columnist for CBC Ottawa,
but knew little about his new book. So much was shared over the course of the
evening that I am certain everyone left having learned something new and with
much to think about.

John Mighton described his experiences with JUMP Math which
started as a tutoring group and expanded as he gained experience with students
in classrooms, and looked to empirical evidence for best teaching practices. The results he has seen are remarkable, and
really dispute the age-old idea that only an elite few can do math. His book The End of Ignorance (and its
predecessor The Myth of Ability) are both fascinating reads that really disrupt
much of what we believe to be truth about education.

John Mighton described what it was like going into a
classroom as a playwright and realizing that a classroom of students can become
an audience. When students are all
learning together as the lesson unfolds it is much like they are the audience
for a play engaging in the story of what they are learning. Yes, they even
engage in the story of math. Mighton discussed
the synergy that happens in the moments when the students are learning
together, and how that is missing when students only learn independently or at
staggered rates due to some being left behind.
Mighton walked us through a mini math lesson, giving us a glimpse of
what we was referring to, the isolation of being left out as others solve a
question you don’t get, and then the collective excitement as you all work
through the concepts to achieve the answer together. To me this was a magical
revelation to consider, so often when we are worried about the end goal of
education we forget about the experience and the value found in the experience
itself. This is something that came up
throughout the evening, the reminder that education is not about the
destination, but the journey.

Joel Westheimer was at ease with the audience and a very
engaging speaker. More than a few times
I was so caught up with what he was saying that I forgot to focus on my
notes. For example I started writing
about the three main things he outlined from his book and only clearly wrote
down the first, which was the current obsession with standardization in
education. The topic of standardized
testing is heavily covered in the news right now, and Westheimer spoke about
how the focus on testing has taken many things of great value out of our
schools. He spoke of the challenge of testing passion, creativity, critical
thinking, art appreciation and many other concepts that are highly valuable but
hard to test, and suggested that instead of measuring what we care about, as a
society, we have chosen to care about what we can measure. This is no clearer
than when discussing school registration with other parents. Every parent I
have spoken with about choosing a school for my daughter has mentioned the EQAO
scores as if they will tell me whether or not the school is a good fit for my
child and family. When I later asked
about choosing a great school the answer was to find one that doesn’t stress
grades, or ranking students, and encourages every student to contribute and
grow, and his suggestion on how to find a school like this was simple: visit
the school and look on the walls, see what the school is choosing to
showcase. That will tell you more about
the culture of the school than the test scores, and is the first step in
measuring what matters.

The theme of the night was “Education for the 21st
Century” and both Westheimer and Mighton shared many great ideas to ensure that
no child is left behind in any way that matters, and while both stressed that
there are great things happening in schools, it is clear that our students are
not being given the education they deserve—yet.

Have you ever gone to an event only to wonder why it isn’t standing room only? As I arrived at the

Education for the 21st century event I was shocked at how small the crowd was, yes I realize there was

an important hockey game on, but I still wanted to yell from the roof top “Ottawa, why aren’t you

here?”. Even though the venue was less than half full, everyone was engaged and interested in the

subject matter and before the event started the room was full of lively discussions about education in

anticipation for the speakers ahead. Given the level of excitement I was shocked when during the

presentations it because clear that many in the audience were unfamiliar with John Mighton’s JUMP

Math program and the results it has achieved for math education. I had just assumed that everyone

there would have been as excited as I was to hear him speak, having read his book when it came out in

2007 after he was interviewed on All in a Day. I knew of Joel Westheimer as the education columnist for

CBC Ottawa, but knew little about his new book. So much was shared over the course of the evening

that I am certain everyone left having learned something new and with much to think about.

John Mighton described his experiences with JUMP Math which started as a tutoring group and

expanded as he gained experience with students in classrooms, and looked to empirical evidence for

best teaching practices. The results he has seen are remarkable, and really dispute the age old idea that

only an elite few can do math. His book The End of Ignorance (and its predecessor The Myth of Ability)

are both fascinating reads that really disrupt much of what we believe to be truth about education.

John Mighton described what it was like going into a classroom as a playwright and realizing that a

classroom of students can become an audience. When students are all learning together as the lesson

unfolds it is much like they are the audience for a play engaging in the story of what they are learning.

Yes, they even engage in the story of math. Mighton discussed the synergy that happens, in the

moments when the students are learning together, and how that is missing when students only learn

independently or at staggered rates due to some being left behind. Mighton walked us through a mini

math lesson, giving us a glimpse of what we was referring to, the isolation of being left out as others

solve a question you don’t get, and then the collective excitement as you all work through the concepts

to achieve the answer together. To me this was a magical revelation to consider, so often when we are

worried about the end goal of education we forget about the experience and the value found in the

experience itself. This is something that came up throughout the evening, the reminder that education

is not about the destination, but the journey.

Joel Westheimer was at ease with the audience and a very engaging speaker. More than a few times I

was so caught up with what he was saying that I forgot to focus on my notes. For example I started

writing about the three main things he outlined from his book and only clearly wrote down the first,

which was the current obsession with standardization in education. The topic of standardized testing is

heavily covered in the news right now, and Westheimer spoke about how the focus on testing has taken

many things of great value out of our schools. He spoke of the challenge of testing passion, creativity,

critical thinking, art appreciation and many other concepts that are highly valuable but hard to test, and

suggested that instead of measuring what we care about, as a society, we have chosen to care about

what we can measure. This is no clearer than when discussing school registration with other parents.

Every parent I have spoken with about choosing a school for my daughter has mentioned the EQAO

scores as if they will tell me whether or not the school is a good fit for my child and family. When I later

asked about choosing a great school the answer was to find one that doesn’t stress grades, or ranking

students, and encourages every student to contribute and grow, and his suggestion on how to find a

school like this was simple: visit the school and look on the walls, see what the school is choosing to

showcase. That will tell you more about the culture of the school than the test scores, and is the first

step in measuring what matters.

The theme of the night was “Education for the 21st Century” and both Westheimer and Mighton shared

many great ideas to ensure that no child is left behind in any way that matters, and while both stressed

that there are great things happening in schools, it is clear that our students are not being given the

It was a great pleasure and privilege to
hear Nancy Huston speak at the Ottawa International Writers Festival last night.

Catherine Voyer-Léger, the director general
of the organization of French Canadian editors, introduced our guest and gave
those not so familiar with Nancy Huston's work a very good overview. Ms. Huston
has written around 50 works of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and other non
fiction. Born in Alberta, she moved to Paris at a young age and has lived there
ever since, becoming an award-winning author in France, Europe as well as in
Canada. In recent years, she explains later, her interest in her Canadian roots
and the English language has grown substantially, due in part to her
researching her family background in Alberta. She has visited northern Alberta
recently, discussed with local First Nations people the impact of the oilsands
on their lives and livelihood. In this context we heard that she recently sold
her personal archives to the National Archives. With the funds she has
established a foundation, Awinita, with the objective to
assist education and training programs for First Nation women, victims of abuse
and neglect. The Foundation's name is that taken from one of the characters in
her latest novel, Black Dance.

To provide the audience with a taste for
her writing (and reading) Nancy Huston read from her latest book, Bad Girl: Classes de littérature. While classified as a récit, which is a very broad term for what the
book represents, it is probably better defined as a kind of literary
fictionalized autobiography or "autofiction" - not a term the author
is very fond of. In response to Catherine's question why she wrote the book in
the second person, Ms. Huston explained that for her the first person voice
would not have worked. Referring to, for example, Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" (I is an
other), she felt that what she had written was one version of reality, that she
created one possible path through it by collecting and assembling many small
pebbles and stones along the way. The structure of Bad Girl matches this
approach very well, as it is written in form of vignettes of varying length,
with much white space on the pages. The addressee of Huston's musings is little
Dorrit, the name she gives her own foetus,
and that she guides from conception to birth. What
emerges is part family history over several generations, part recounting of
memory about her own growing up, about her mother and father and also, directly
and indirectly, a select commentary on issues of the wider society over the
decades she has lived through. Ms. Huston has a very expressive reading voice,
so it was a great pleasure to listen to her interpretation of the text:
sometimes very funny, ironic, and sometimes with a twinkle in her eyes.

In the ensuing discussion the author
elaborated on her preference for the second person voice. It gives her a
certain distance to the subject matter but also addresses the reader more
directly. She hopes that the reader can see him/herself in little Dorrit and
what she learns from the adult version of herself.

Many more topics were addressed in the conversation
between Catherine Voyer-Léger and Ms. Huston, too many to reflect here. Always
referring back to the author's writing, the audience was treated to more
insights and reflections. Seen by many as a
strong feminist, she told us that, in fact, in recent years she has been
thinking and writing more about men and their issues than about women.

One
topic that spoke to me personally very much was that of living a large part of
your life in a different linguistic and cultural context. When Ms. Huston moved
to Paris she totally absorbed herself in French and French culture. She hardly
used English then. It is only in more recent years and her re-emerging interest
in her background and family history that she returned to English to live
parallel to French. While she referred to herself for a long time as
"French" she now thinks of herself as "foreigner - étranger" and she
moved to a multilingual and multicultural part of Paris. Her life changed in
other ways to and she feels healthier and happier now than she has been years
back. She admitted, smiling, it might also have something to do with her
partner of a few years, the Swiss painter Guy
Oberson. Together they have engaged in several new projects, such as her
poetry collection, beautifully illustrated by him, Terrestres. This volume
explores the connections between human life and the environment as well as the
animal aspects of human beings and their animal behaviour.

During her stay in Canada Nancy Huston will
participate in the Festival Metropolis Bleu in Montréal. She will be the recipient
of the prestigious Met Bleu Grand Prix littéraire international 2015. She is
especially delighted to receive this honour because it is the only truly
bilingual international literary prize.

There is a
black-and-white photograph of Kenneth standing in sunlight beside a prairie
railway station. He is loose-limbed and smiling, happy maybe, or at least
unconcerned about the journey he seems poised to take. (The
Night Stages,
p. 3)

Thus
began the evening with host and author Charlotte Gray, and Jane Urquhart, author of bestselling novels Away (1997)
and The Stone Carvers (2010).
Urquhart, reading from her newest novel, The
Night Stages (2015), was composed and collected at the podium in Christ
Church Cathedral Ottawa, where the first special event of the spring Writers
Fest season unfurled.

Reading
with a muted passion, Urquhart introduced her audience to Kenneth Lochhead, one
of the central characters of The Night
Stages and a fictionalized interpretation of the real-life Canadian artist
(1926-2006). This Ottawa boy would grow up to paint a 72-foot-long mural in the
“crossroads of the world” – the international airport in Gander, Newfoundland –
titled Flight and Its Allegories. In
1958, Urquhart later explained, this airport was the hub for all airplane
flights between Europe and North America for the very practical reason of
refuelling. Lochhead’s colourful mural would have greeted all the weary
international travellers in transit.

Such
is the case for Tamara, the English protagonist of The Night Stages. Tam, having fled the west coast of Ireland for
New York City, is grounded in Gander for three days due to fog. With the mural
as her companion, she reflects on her past as she waits for the fog to lift in
order to seek a new future. She is leaving behind a relationship and a home, in
full flight from the wild landscape of County Kerry.

Urquhart
shared that she recently sold her own place in Kerry, a milestone that was bittersweet
for her. She reminisced nostalgically on her many years spent writing in her
little cottage; the first lyrical draft always in longhand. She has a
passionate relationship with Ireland – the people, the landscape, and the
poetry interwoven in every aspect of life and integral to understanding and
appreciating the island’s rugged beauty. Ireland, she explained, “is a part of
the world where people really, really care about family.”

Her
love for Ireland is apparent in a number of her novels, including The Night Stages. In fact, the Irish
landscape becomes itself like a character, telling its own story and
influencing those who dwell within it. The second passage that Urquhart chose
to read aloud illustrated this, the “marvellous, heartbreaking, toughness of
the Kerry landscape.” In this passage, Kieran, the third interwoven story of
the novel, has gone up into the mountains. There, along with two of three
remaining mountain men, he observes “the hardness of this life, and then the
beauty.”[1]

The
rugged beauty of Ireland, however, does not prevent people from leaving it. Departure is an underlying current throughout both the novel and evening at Christ
Church. The Gander airport, its mural (the inspiration for the novel), Tam’s
career as a pilot, Tam fleeing from Kerry, Kieran’s own story of disappearance,
and the landscape slowly being depopulated – all these share in common the idea
of changing place, departing for elsewhere. Urquhart’s own departure from
Ireland came during the writing of this novel. This novel, she acknowledged, is
a memorial of sorts. She wanted to honour the people she left behind and mourn
the loss caused by leaving.

This
evening with Urquhart revealed the mind behind the minds of her stories. The
insights she gave into her muses for the novel and the real people who inspired
several of the characters showed a woman who has few qualms about taking
liberties with reality and an artist who knows herself and yet conquers anyways.
Michael Kirby, a deeply respected neighbour of Urquhart’s in Kerry, for
example, was also Kieran’s bicycle coach in the novel. In truth, he was a fisherman
and local poet, but she took care to ensure that he held his genuine character.
And in spite of a self-proclaimed “despise for sport”, she understood from near
beginning that a bicycle race, the An Post Rás, (“the Irish Tour-de-France”) would play
a significant role in revealing the landscape and toxic relationship between
two brothers.

Urquhart may have departed
from Ireland but showed this evening that she has not departed from herself. She
shared that when she was writing her first novel back in the 1980s, she truly
believed she was writing a prose poem. She has remained true to her lyrical
cadence in her eighth story today. She still sculpts words into art and
captures passion in poetic melody in order to share with her readers the
significance of beauty remaining long after a leaving has taken place.
“Writing,” she said when pondering the changes in her life, “is a way of making
that which is fragile and fleeting permanent.”

I always love the anticipatory buzz of the
events of the Writers Festival. Perhaps I begin every event review with those
same words, but that is because they are true. The selection of events is
diverse and fascinating, and none so much as this pre-festival event with
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who is, to say the very least, a distinguished and engaging
speaker.

As with many of the other events of the
Writers Festival, this event took place at Centretown United Church. Often the beauty
and acoustics of such old churches are merely a surfeit. On Tuesday,
however, those acoustics were more important than ever due to the opening
performance of traditional dance and throat singing from the Nunavut Sivuniksavut students. This was my
first time hearing throat singing, which I found haunting and beautiful, and an
excellent introduction and connection to Watt-Cloutier’s life and work.

As Intuit
Tapiriit Kanatami president Terry Audla shared in the introduction to this
event, Sheila Watt-Cloutier was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, has
thirteen honorary doctorates, and possesses a seemingly endless list of other
achievements. She is an environmental activist and educator, and is strongly
connected to the Ottawa community based on how many familiar faces she pointed
out at her event.

Watt-Cloutier’s first book, The Right to be Cold, may initially
be perceived as a book about the environment and climate change. As Writers
Festival founder Neil Wilson commented, however, The Right to be Cold is more of a love letter and memoir than an
environmental treatise. Watt-Cloutier made clear that a large part of her
intent behind her book The Right to be
Cold was to alleviate the burden placed on the current generation because
they carry so much trauma from their predecessors. There was much talk at this
event about having Watt-Cloutier’s book incorporated into school curriculum, which I whole-heartedly agree with.

When speaking about the book’s content, Watt-Cloutier
made sure to emphasize that putting the challenges of the Inuit people into
context was important. Watt-Cloutier explained that, contrary to what many
people believe, it is not just a way of life that has been taken from the Inuit
communities and they aren’t able to adapt. In fact, Watt-Cloutier points out,
Inuit people are highly adaptable due to the importance of hunting within Inuit
culture.

People have asked Watt-Cloutier why she
spends so much of her time and energy focusing on the environment when so many other social problems exist. Her consistent response is that she
does not see any disconnect between environmental problems and social ones.
One of the examples she provided was that of the seismic
testing in Clyde River. The Clyde River community is concerned that seismic
testing would harm or frighten away the marine animals upon which Clyde River
residents depend upon for survival. Although the seismic testing certainly concerns the environment, Watt-Cloutier shows that there are also deep
connections to the lives of people. Watt-Cloutier also mentioned of her work
with Many Strong Voices, a
fascinating and important initiative that works to connect Inuit communities
where the ice is melting to small island nations where the land is sinking.

Although the last thing most Canadians are
thinking of at this time of year is how badly they want to be cold, Sheila
Watt-Cloutier’s book will cause them to consider the cold in a different light,
and to side with Watt-Cloutier with believing that we all have more in common
than we think. For those curious about the specific content of the book, Naomi
Klein’s review of The Right to be
Cold is well worth the read.

On a rainy
morning a few weeks ago, I wandered into the Metropolitain Brasserie off Sussex
for the Ottawa International Writers Festival first literary luncheon of 2015.
It was perhaps one of the most exciting lunches I have attended because earlier
that week I had attended a Literary Café at York Street Public School that
showcased the work of the grade three class we have been running a pilot
project with for the last ten weeks. The desks were lined up to showcase the
comic books and short stories the children had created in the workshops. The
students sat before a roomful of parents and siblings ready to read their group
short stories and share what they had learned.

Over
the last year that I have been working for the festival and I have attended
several of our in-school author visits, but our Write On! pilot project was the
first time I got to see what students can produce if they are given the
opportunity to let their imagination run wild and work with professional
writers and artists. So, attending our literary luncheon with Andrew Morton, I was
full of hope knowing this event would not only be fascinating but would help
give back to Ottawa students.

When I
arrived Andrew Morton was sitting at the bar talking with Development Director
Neil Wilson, but their quiet chat didn’t last for long. As our lunch guests
began to arrive, many of them recognised Morton and took this pre-lunch
opportunity to snap a photo of themselves and the acclaimed journalist and
writer. Morton was charming and looked pleased to pose with the women as they
came in and to sign books.

The
Morton luncheon was a sold out even and the tables were bustling with chatter.
Among the guests were many members of The Monarchist League of Canada, including the head of the Ottawa Branch Mary de Toro, and acclaimed journalist
Don Newman. Over salad and wine, Morton dished about his research for 17
Carnations with host Jayne Watson, as the last few guests arrived.

As the
salad plates were cleared away, Morton and Watson took centre stage and
launched into the story of the abdication of Edward VIII. Edward was a
reluctant king, Morton explained, who probably never wanted to be king. The
story behind his abdication is his poorly regarded love affair with Wallis
Simpson. Simpson was an American socialite who was not only a divorcée, but
still married while she was courting Edward. When Edward became king he insisted
on marrying Simpson, but Parliament and the Royal Family would not hear of it.
Edward was headstrong though and when he abdicated before his coronation his
love for Simpson was cited as the reason.

There is no reason they could not
have been together, Morton explained, if Edward had waited until after
his coronation; when he could have quietly ushered Simpson into his life, as one such
royal has done in recent years. A chuckle went around the crowd.

The
shadowy part of this story of course, is the Nazi connection. Simpson was not
simply a lover who fell into Edward’s path but a woman put in his way by
Hitler. For years, Morton recounted, Hitler had been looking for ways to win
the sympathies of Britain and he saw that in Edward. Simpson was sympathetic to
the Nazi cause before she met Edward, having previously a member of the Nazi
Party, Hitler saw her as an ideal partner to woo Edward. And
Edward was wooed. After abdicating he spent time with Hitler in Germany until
he was pulled out of the region by Churchill.

The
story of their marriage, of their strange demands and attempts to stay in touch
with Hitler make for an interesting narrative, but the most enlightening parts
were when Morton shined a light on the real Edward. He recounted a visit Edward
took to Canada in his late teens, before he was king. It was probably one of
the only times Edward was free, Morton suggested. He didn’t have to think about
his duties, or conform to expectations. Canada was in this instance an idyllic
land where Edward could truly be himself. Morton also noted that Edward had
been quite close to Churchill, though he did not take Churchill’s advice about
Simpson, they inevitably began to grow apart.

Throughout
the talk, the crowd laughed and I could tell that many of them were familiar
with the history and relationships within the Royal Family. This became even
more apparent during the questions and answer period where a few men in the
audience chimed in to provide further insight into the goings-on of the clan.

After
the chat and the meal, I was pleased to talk with one of the men who had been
keen on providing such insights. I asked him what had attracted him to this
event and to my surprise he hadn’t come because of the Royal Family but because
of Wallis Simpson. “She knew what she was doing,” he told me, “she plotted her
life and marriages out very carefully. I just find her to be a fascinating
person.” And so the saying goes, behind every great man there is an equally
great woman.

Everyone knows the story of The Great
Escape. Forever enshrined in cinematic history, the
iconic movie tells the tale of a group of
prisoners-of-war digging a tunnel underneath their containment camp
and escaping their German captors. But is that really the true story?
History tells us a different tale.

As author Ted
Barris states, “Hollywood never lets facts
get in the way of a good story.” The fact of the matter is that
many of the key players in the true
story of The Great Escape—the diggers,
scroungers, forgers and stooges—were Canadian.

This is Ted Barris’ third time at the
Ottawa Writers Festival and, as soon as he begins speaking, I can see
why he has been invited to return. The energy and passion with which
he talks about history—about this story in particular and the men
who conspired to make it happen—is contagious. He talks about the
men as if they are close family members, his voice soft with
compassion as he speaks their names; Roger Bushell, Wally Floody,
Gordon Kidder, Johnny Weir, Tony Pengelly, Kingsley Brown, Frank
Sorenson and Don McKim—to name but a few. And he has become like
family to them too; in 2011, Barris was awarded a Minister of
Veteran’s Affairs Commendation, chosen and honoured by the veterans
themselves.

The setting of this remarkable story is
Stalag Luft III, a German POW camp in Sagan, Poland. The Germans
thought that housing all their worst flight-risk prisoners in one
place would be a good idea, and the resulting compound was built with
escape deterrence in mind. The barracks were raised up off the ground
on stilts so that the patrolling Luftwaffe guards could look under
the buildings to make sure the prisoners weren’t tunnelling beneath
them.

Microphones were buried in the ground around the barracks so
that any sounds could be detected. What the Germans didn’t take
into account, however, was that by putting their most troublesome,
inventive and brilliant prisoners in one place, they were forming a
dream team of escape artists.

Just one year after it was built,
Stalag Luft III housed 5,000 Commonwealth airmen. In the story of the
Great Escape, approximately 2,000 of these men would play some part.
The sheer scale of effort and hard work that went into the planning
of that single night in 1944 is astounding. The men who were involved
covered every detail meticulously; from the forged work permits with
near-authentic stamps created by carving into wooden boot heels, to
the cardboard suitcases and dyed and modified prison uniforms to make
them appear like civilians.

The ingenuity of the men, and their
unrelenting commitment to their cause, meant that on the night of
March 24, 1944 — 71 years ago today — 80 of the prisoners crawled
through one of the four tunnels they had dug, 360 foot long ‘Harry’,
and were able to escape the camp. However, the ending is not happy
but tragic. Upon finding out about the escape, Hitler ordered the
capture and execution of every man who had fled.

In the end, because
there were German POWs held by Allied Forces and the Germans feared
retaliation, 50 of the 80 escapees were murdered. They were shot,
cremated, and buried in a corner of the compound that they had spent
so long planning to be free from.

The Great Escape
is a story of teamwork, companionship, and the ability to never give
up hope, even in the bleakest and most hopeless of situations. At the
site
of the former Stalag Luft III camp, the
barracks, guard towers, and wire fencing may be gone but the memory
of The Great Escape—and the men who took part in it—are
commemorated by a monument often wreathed in flowers.

The previously
untold stories, now forever remembered in the work of Barris. Not
Hollywood, but history.

In
her most recent novel Love
Enough,
Dionne Brand provides readers with glimpses into the daily lives of
an eclectic cast of characters whose lives intersect in unexpected
ways. Set in Toronto, the novel explores from multiple perspectives
what it means to love—and to love enough.

There
is June, a middle-aged social activist discontented with her
relationship with her lover. She gives temporary haven to Bedri, a
young man going deeper and deeper into a life of crime with his best
friend Ghost. Bedri’s choices disappoint the wishes of his
immigrant father, Da’uud, a polyglot and talented economist who
drives a taxi in Canada. Ghost’s sister Lia gives up the
opportunity for companionship and adventure with Jasmeet, feeling
tied to her irresponsible and chaotic mother Mercede.

As
each of these characters navigates their lives in the largest city in
Canada, they work through what it means to love those around
them—lovers, mothers, sons, and strangers.

Brand
writes with such easy familiarity about a city that she knows and
loves deeply that readers feel instantly at home in the setting. Love
Enough invites us to walk Toronto’s streets alongside the
characters, to inhabit ordinary corners of a vibrant city and explore
its secret haunts. The novel’s opening lines beckon with both
invitation and instruction:

The
best way of looking at a summer sunset in this city is in the
rear-view mirror. Or better, the side mirrors of a car. So startling.
All the subtlety, the outerworldliness of the sunset follows you….
If you ever travel east along Dupont Street, at that time, look back.

Brand’s
lyrical language paints pictures like that throughout the book. Lake
Ontario “oscillates like green-blue wet glass,” while “Toronto
sits disconsolate, humid in its thick pink fibreglass insulation.”
This language, rarely clichéd or expected, is one of the book’s
high points—unsurprising, given that the author has won the
Governor General’s Award for her poetry.

The
story-lines, on the other hand, sometimes fall flat. The novel’s
worst moments read like character sketches written in preparation for
something else; Brand often tells us about June’s life instead of
letting us watch her live it. She states conclusions rather than
painting scenarios from which we could draw our own conclusions, and
so June’s life often feels detached, aloof.

Bedri’s
narrative acts as a counterpoint to June’s, drawing readers in with
its immediacy and intensity. Having committed an awful crime, and
knowing each miserable way he has failed his family, Bedri is both
desperate for love and desperate to love. After a desolate encounter
with his sister, he realizes that his family is afraid of him, and he
decides that the best way to love them is to disappear from their
lives. Yet he still longs for love. At a bus stop, “something made
him hold his hand out for the people standing there to see.” The
people rebuff him, not understanding, and Bedri “stood for a while,
his hand still outstretched, then he turned and began running down
the street with his hand extended.”

Like Bedri, Love Enough’s other
characters are often more concerned with receiving love
than giving it. Lia focuses on her mother’s
failures. June is preoccupied with the ways in which her lover,
Sydney, disappoints her, and this preoccupation “bounces and
bounces like a pendulum” in her head.

As
the novel progresses, however, they learn to give love in
small and imperfect ways, coming to understand that “there is
nothing universal or timeless about this love business… It is hard
if you really want to do it right.” Ghost fathers a child,
and when he’s at home, “the baby crawls onto him
and plays with the scar on his chest and he feels as if the baby’s
hand is sinking past the scar and into his heart.” Sydney
tells June that June collects sadness, and this single
sentence of understanding, of knowing, fills June up.

The
novel opens with that shimmering sunset on Dupont Street,
a street that Brand describes as grim and ugly, filled with
car-wrecking shops and taxi sheds, desolate diners and hardware
stores. Ethereal beauty juxtaposed with the grim, concrete realities
of the city. “A sunset is in the perfect location here,”
Brand says. “Needed.” As though the simple, subtle beauty of
a single sunset is love enough.

In
many ways, this opening scene stands as a metaphor for every other
moment in the book. As Brand takes us through the small and
large catastrophes of each individual life, we see the
characters’ baggage and their flaws, out on
display like wares of a pawnshop or greasy car parts
in a mechanic shop. Yet we also see moments of love, beautiful
not because they are perfect, but because they are needed.

At just 26, Francis Wray, the protagonist of Sarah Waters’ latest novel, has already let life slip through her fingers. Burdened by her late father’s debts, her life seems as drab as the postwar London suburb in which she lives with her widowed mother. In a house absent of servants, it is left to Francis to fill the role of housemaid and cook but even these effortsare not enough to maintain their once-grand house. In a moment of considered desperation, the Wray women place an advertisement for lodgers.

As the novel opens we see how their reduced circumstances bring them into strange intimacy with the Barbers – the titular “paying guests” –who rent the advertised rooms and transform them to their image:

It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. The faded carpet in her mother’s old bedroom was lost beneath pseudo-Persian rugs. The lovely pier-glass had been draped slant-wise with a fringed Indian shawl … the wicker birdcage twirled slowly on a ribbon from a hook that had been screwed into the ceiling; inside it was a silk-and-feather parrot on papier-mâchéperch.

The young couple and their invited intrusion quickly upend Francis’ orderly life, “She simply hadn’t prepared herself for the oddness of the sound and the sight of the couple going about from room to room as if the rooms belong to them. When Mr. Barber, for example, headed back upstairs after a visit to the yard, she heard him pause in the hall. Wondering what could be delaying him, she ventured a look along the passage and saw him gazing at the pictures on the walls like a man in a gallery. Leaning in for a better look at a steel engraving of Ripon Cathedral he put his fingers to his pocket and brought out a matchstick, with which he began idly picking his teeth.”

Yet Francis is not simply an observer, she finds herself the observed as well: “He[Mr. Barber] seemed to enjoy watching her work. His blue gaze travelled over her and she felt him taking her all in: her apron, her steam-frizzed hair, her rolled-up sleeves, her scarlet knuckles.”The first to poke fun at her own poverty, his unsaid observations nevertheless rankle Francis while interactions with Mrs. Barber are similarly fraught, but for altogether different reasons. For a time, however, a balance is struck, however uneasy, and while longtime fans of Waters will not be shocked by the turn of events, those new to her work may be surprised by how the plot unfolds.

A Man Booker Finalist for Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009) the first of which centered on the Victorian era and the latter two on the 1940s, Waters has turned to the 1920s for inspiration for her sixth novel. Far removed from the jazz and gin that characterizes so many novels set in during the “roaring twenties,”The Paying Guests instead focuses on those shifting social and economic relationships that shook families like the Wrays and elevated persons like the Barbers.Issues of class, gender, love and desire, and courage and cowardice underpin the novel and it is largely the setting that allows for such themes to develop.

For as much as anything, this is a story about a house. Once, we are told, it was a “fine old house,” fringed by spacious gardens, set on a leafy street on Champion Hill, surrounded by other stately homes. Indeed, despite its location, set firmly in the suburbs of London, the house brings to mind those grand country homes that seem to populate so much of the British literary landscape – from Thornfieldand Wuthering Heights to Atonement’s Tallis House and The Little Stranger’s Hundreds Hall, as featured in Waters’ 2009 offering.

These houses, with their twisting corridors and darkened corners, create the ideal setting for whispered secrets and longing glances, making them the ideal setting to explore forbidden attraction. Yet the house is also a testament to a bygone era, serving as a sort of crumbling mausoleum for a way of life that has been lost in the trenches along with a generation of young men. Indeed, the house is so central to creating tension in the plot that when the characters move outside, the novel at times seems to sag. This is in large part because of the character of Francis; privy only to her thoughts and motivations, which provides a sense of intrigue for the reader, her self-imposed exile and subservience to the house means that her movements outside of it read as somewhat false. For while she may feel trapped by the house, this sense ofcaptivity gives her power and energy as a character.

The novel is divided into three sections and while Part One is eminently readable, ending delicately and perfectly about 200 pages in, the rest of the novel lacks the tautness that propels the first section. It is not that the plot meanders, but rather the direction it takes seems a bit predictable. There are some overly convenient twists and turns toward the end of the novel and the final pages, unfortunately, read as rather anticlimactic if true to the characters. Yet, Waters’ characteristic eye for detail makes the novel worth reading. She does not overwhelm her characters with stuffy period dialogue nor does she transport modern characters into the past. Rather she creates believable characters trapped by the expectations of the time in which they live.

There is a cartoon on the web showing a
stick figure sitting at a computer, thinking to himself:

An
x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the
XNU kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified
abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in turn is
straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko renderer, which creates a Flash
object which renders dozens of video frames every second.

Divine status conferred by the viewing of cat
videos; it is an image very much in line with Douglas Coupland’s project in Kitten Clone. On a journey through the multinational
IT company Alcatel-Lucent, Coupland explores the phenomenon of the Internet at
a point where its growing adoption and burgeoning speed are significantly
impacting how humans do things and even relate to one another. His hope is that
conversations with a technology giant responsible for building many of the
physical components comprising the Internet will illuminate these effects and
serve as “a stepping stone into a larger meditation…about what data and speed
and optical wiring are doing to us as a species.”

Kitten
Clone is divide into four
parts: a fictional scene in French Alsace in 1871, followed by descriptions of
visits to global Alcatel-Lucent offices to explore the past, present, and
future of the Internet. The past is examined at Bell Labs (New Jersey, USA), where
much of the basic research underlying modern telecommunications was done starting
in the mid-twentieth century; the present at facilities in France (Paris, Calais)
and Canada (Ottawa); and the future at operations in China (Pudong, Shanghai). The
book “has a “surfy” feel to it”: 87 of 176 pages are photos by photographer
Olivia Arthur, the format intends to mimic web pages and thus how we see and
use information on the Internet. At each stage, Coupland gives his thoughts and
reflections on Internet technology, the industry creating it, and its impact.

The book has some successes. A range of themes
are examined that are relevant to a society where information technology is increasingly
pervasive: the simultaneous bewilderment and awe felt by lay people towards technology
and those who produce it; the rapid and widespread adoption of high-speed
Internet; the underfunding of long-term scientific research, even when focussed
on technological (and thus industrial/business) ends; the growing view that
fast Internet connectivity is a utility akin to the power grid; and the removal
of class distinctions through Internet use and availability. Arising from these
themes are a host of good questions. Is “technological determinism” true, the
idea that “humans exist only to propagate ever-newer technologies”? What have
we learned about ourselves via the Internet that we didn’t already know? And
what will all of this bandwidth do to us? Interacting with the people who build
the Internet (rather than Internet users, web designers, or cultural critics) also
provides an unusual perspective on these questions.

Coupland achieves the “surfy” feel that he
sought;Kitten Clone really is reminiscent of a web page. Too much so. Each
stage of the book visits a new place, scans it, makes some observations, asks some
questions, and quickly flits to the next location and collection of images; the
forms of the web are mimicked without redeeming their failings, much of the discussion
floating on the surface of subjects of great depth. Coupled with that, and all
too fitting, the prose is too often and too obviously overdone. Describing the
Head of Bell Labs Research, Markus Hoffman, Coupland writes that

[he]
looks like a school principal who’d discipline you without resorting to
corporal punishment, and his eyes tell me that, at any given moment he’s
probably figuring out the natural logarithm of his Visa card number or what his
lunch might look like connected by strings into the fifth and/or sixth
dimensions.

This is trying too hard to be clever
without advancing the book’s project at all.

Coupland’s questions and pool of
interviewees are mismatched as well. Being a telecommunications engineer
myself, and knowing many others, this is no surprise. Most of my peers in the
technical disciplines would readily admit to having no good answer for the
question of what the Internet is doing to us, for the simple reason that they don’t
see it as their role to address such topics. Coupland is quite right that technically
trained voices have a place in the conversation, but few will have the tools or
interest to engage it; in terms of their training, their perspective, and the
demands of their work, it is just not on their radar.

What technical people tend to do instead is
acquiesce to common narratives about technology and our relationship to it, and
Coupland does the same. One striking example is his discussion of narrative
itself:

The
now-fading notion that our lives should be stories is a psychological
inevitability imbued in readers by the logic of the book and fiction as a
medium: focus; sequencing; emotional through-lines; morals; structure; climax;
denouement. One can look back on the print era and witness true poignancy:
readers the world over were determined to see their lives as stories, when, in
fact, books are a specific invention that creates a specific mindset.

That is, the use of narrative to express meaning
is an outgrowth of the printed word that is being lost in the Internet Age. To
see such a contentious thesis offered without
supporting evidence is actually stunning, particularly when one reflects that
tribes of the Amazon basin, playwrights of antiquity, and present-day
technological determinists are united in being incorrigible storytellers. Asking
how our tools of communication, such as broadband Internet, affect the stories
we tell and how we tell them is very much to the point; rejecting narrative as
such is not. Another example is his discussion of technological determinism. To
Coupland’s credit, he poses the question of whether or not we shall be ruled by
the Almighty Bit, but he does little to explore that question or what
alternatives might exist. Indeed, when we read early on that “[l]ooking at
human history and the history of technology, there’s a certain sort of
inevitability to its parade,” one suspects that the fix is in.

And it is. Coupland offers an answer to his key
question in the end. In a closing mini-narrative depicting a future where
kittens are cloned and synthesized in mere moments but are eaten as soon as their
presence becomes inconvenient, we learn our fate: we shall have unimaginable
technological power, and be monsters. The Internet will rewire and reprogram us,
causing us to forget much and learn little about ourselves and our world. The
meditation ends not with a bang but a fatalistic whimper. We shall be slaves, with
hardly a shot fired.